Critical Review of Technology Product Strategies

June 13, 2009

Now, If you are not a social gaming startup, but are a supply chain or POS network hosted on AWS, you can do the calculus on whether AWS uptime (excellent by any measure) is better than a solid in-house solution for mission critical infrastructure. Maybe for some, it computes, for others maybe not.

But when the cloud fails, your alternatives have to be in place.
Such as: POS systems might have a set of distributed machines to
capture inbound records and route card transactions. Rapid
Replenishment systems might capture transaction logs for instant
replications once your cloud host comes back. You might have a set of
managed APIs that broker to another cloud and then reconcile the resynch.

Many paths. However, there are some businesses that can tolerate the
outages that are sure to occur as more move to remote services. One
thing is for sure: The single point of failure is not just the cloud infrastructure
and platform providers. The land rush to get the mid market onto PAAS
solutions has been somewhat willfully blind regarding the following
fact – most small /med biz has only one high speed connection, and most
have not thought through the issues of hot comms failover at multiple
sites.

PAAS that Gas, boys. One of the best things about hosted services in
the cloud has been hardly spoken about – It’s great to have all remote
offices and facilities routed to a central gateway, rather than running
a mishmash of multi-point routers with arcane rules. Downside, comms. Even most SMBs in the 2-25M $$ gross revenue range have been struggling with this. It is what has made the Cisco certifications a viable IT job and created a freelance market.

May 30, 2009

When people read my posts and comments on other great blogs regarding my opinions about rating and certifying cloud hosts, SAAS, PAAS, they sometimes think that I am 100% against cloud based
soltuions. This is patently incorrect, as I routinely recommend hosted
SAAS for project management, small business, budget constrained start
ups, etc. What I do not recommend is that mid market businesses that
have CLOB (capital line of business) applications, hosted on their own
racks, or managed by a conventional, stable vendor, change to a cloud
solution until the PAAS and SAAS providers get industry rating and
certifications. The SNA shops knew
this, and went through the in house/ hosted rating travail. The result?
An industry in which any business owner can get insurance for business continuity disruption that is caused by IT systems failures. If you are a mid sized business with an internal server rack, distributed multisite architecture, or a hosted AS400
or new IBM architecture, you can insure your operations. You can insure
any Redhat, Microsoft, BEA, Websphere, whatever installation, managed
and rated SAS70, or hosted in your unairconditooned broom closet, but
it will cost a little more. A nice underwriter will come to your place
or your managed host’s place, and write a policy.

Can’t do this with the current cloud offerings. Doesn’t mean that
cloud computing ain’t here to stay, but some folks take issue with me
saying anything regarding the unrated and uninsured nature of the
especially thinly capitalized PAAS solutions. Oy! But now, a shout out
to a hero I have never met, Jane Mcarty, – yeah! yeah! You go girl!

Jane actually puts her hands on web hosted apps, asks and applies
proof of feature performance criteria in much the same way that any
good CIO or upper level staffer would do with a licensed server
application. Jane uncovers such simple and basic things that one says,
“the PAAS vendor didn’t know that?, huh?”. Good on you, Jane.

It was on Jane’s stellar bog that I spotted a comment thread a few
days old, where a shill for the cloud industry says, in so many words,
that the time to question the cloud hosted apps is over, they are
established and able to deliver, and that self styled analysts, like
me, have NO BID-NESS asking what if the service goes down, whaaaaaa!
Self hosted solutions go down. And then the commenter Russell
says one of the most amazingly naive things I have ever seen in print,
maybe in my entire life”: See the actual thread here.

“Many of the PaaS
providers are in business with deep pockets (Force and Quickbase), well
funded by professional investors (Bungee Labs), running with
established management teams (Quickbase), or conservatively managed
with established customer bases (WorkXpress).”

Ok, where do I begin to refuse this insanity? How about the TechCrunch.com deadpool? No? Lets start with a quote from Tref Laplante,, a principal at Workxpress.com, who says:

WorkXpress is committed to its customers and the quality of its product. To this end it is a
privately held, revenue generating company that to date has not
received venture capital funding, and therefore is not under pressure
to behave in ways that run counter to its mission of customers and
product.” (emphasis mine).

You can see my context on this piece of Mr. LaPlante’s unassailable logic here. But, I digress. And I wish nothing but good for workxpress,com.

On the one hand, we have Russell the unknown
commenter saying that VC funded PAAS platforms are an assurance and a
bulwark against the vicissitudes of having a mission critical platform
beyond one’s ultimate control; Partnership disputes, forced sales by
the limited partners, and raids of the venture’s bank account by
coked out CEO? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Ok, got
it. VC funded PAAS, though unaudited and closed to inspection, and with
unknown capital reserves, is safe because is overseen by, (wait for it
now) professional investors. Gawd.

On the other hand, we have a principal of a popular, (and in my
opinion one of the better) PAAS shops saying that because they are NOT
VC funded, they are more trustworthy, due to the fact that they are, so
to speak, master baiters of their own hosted hooks and fly rods

In either case we have no idea how much runway the venture has as
far as operating capital is concerned. In the case of the giants
(Amazon, Intuit, Google, Gogrid, Rackspace ), when they go down, it
doesn’t matter because then it is bad and you will merely get an
apology and a small refund.

If your business lines are damaged, taking crucial cash flow out of
your pocket, and goads the potential for civil liability (in cases of
service critical business), then you are truly screwed doubly, as there
are no lines of underwriting that will insure a PAAS solution for
anything but the actual costs of the outage.

May 26, 2009

The guys over at WorkXpress.com are doing a little business continuity reassurance work today by posting a blog
article about how portable their product and data architecture is, and
how that addresses issues of service continuity. Well, maybe they are
new to the real issues of the CLOB application world where failover
means instant recovery. I am sure they are working hard on an innovative
PAAS platform, but until they understand what the AS400 services crowd
understood long ago – continuity means what it says, continuous or
predictable Resurrection of services within a specified time frame. As
to the usability issues of WorkXpress, see Jane Mcarty’s excellent blog here.

Assuring people that your cloud, PAAS, SAAS solution is just great,
is no reassurance at all – it MAY work great, and MAY be reliable MOST
of the time, but, if the company and the application are not rated and
certified, if your business’ books are not open to any third party (so
as to ascertain liquidity) such reassurances are just whitewash. See
the original WorkXpress blog post here.

My reply to their post:

“That code can be exported is comforting, but in and of itself does
not comprise a complete continuity solution. If a client wants to take
a work group app and trade an incumbent architecture for A PAAS, one
needs seamless cut-over. Seamless fail over from PASS platform to
backup boxes, or to alternative cloud hosts are non-trivial. Saying
that data and platform logic is exportable is less than half the battle
to CLOB (capital line of business) certified reliability.

Not one or hardly any of the PAAS vendors have been rated,
certified. Saying the platform code will be in escrow is also just
potential whitewash that does nothing to address the issue of imminent
failover. WorkExpress might be a great platform, but merely stating: “WorkXpress
is committed to its customers and the quality of its product. To this
end it is a privately held, revenue generating company that to date has
not received venture capital funding, and is not under pressures to
behave in ways that counter to its mission of customers and product…”
The foregoing merely says in other words that that Workxpress is
unrated by any third party that audits reliability. You guys might have
a great product, but for the mission critical CLOB applications, you
are in the same boat as any other unrated, unaudited PAAS platform.”

If you are contemplating going the PAAS route, and handing not only
your data, but your operations to an unaudited third party that proudly
states that they are “privately capitalized and profitable, therefore
good for you!”, be careful, very careful indeed.

April 24, 2009

Do you have hosted (SAAS, PAAS, Cloud) tools and apps that are mired
in the Web 2.0 freemium swamp? Minor modifications to features and
market-specific messaging can re-target your products towards real,
paying client constituencies. Yes, you can get paid for real web-based productivity
applications. Technical services, equipment maintenance, Test and
Measurement, fleet services. Target, get perspective, broaden your
product horizons with my services. Let me help you save that code base.

Lets say your company has a web application (or any software system)
that might have the potential to cross over from the horizontal to the
specialty vertical or technical industrial markets, but you are not
sure how to approach the sector for validation or go-to-market? What is
the potential market volume, who influences, certifies, what features
need modification? Let’s go.

Let’s say you have a lead that someone, some company needs a jump
start into a specialty technical market, such as product service, supply chain, etc. Get me a referral and I will pay you 20%
off the top of my contract. Hire me on contract to provide contract
management services, and I will lop off 15% of my standard rate.

April 19, 2009

I realized of late that when people
asked what I do professionally, my fast repartee was not clear enough.
This is all fine when the tech sector is booming and the referrals are
flying in. However, when things slow down, like now, we can't take any
chances. So what do I do, exactly? A review of all of my on-line
professional profiles showed a ghastly mishmash.

This is what I do:

I currently work for Product Managers as a strategic sector helper.

I evaluate vertical and technical B2B sectors prior to my client PM's pulling the development trigger. I provide specific steering (mid dev time-line)
on what features need to be tweaked, what market approaches need
sector-specific massaging, and all that trade org liaison work that few
want to do.

I spot hot trends where consumer web app waves might cross over into a profitable vertical where the users pay for the service.

I make the right calls at the right time, delivering cogent written
and oral advice to your management; I almost never miss when creating
value, fostering partnerships, and creating the groundwork for new
products and innovation.

My rates are more than reasonable considering the stakes, and I
never drag a contract out, usually wrapping in less than 6 months.

links

notes

I am an analyst specializing in new product strategies and critical review of new technology sectors. I am your outside eyes, a fresh POV, and a broadly experienced technical renaissance man. See my resume link above.